I first heard about Gannon’s Caine Riordan series at LTUE, when Baen editor Toni Weisskopf showed off some of their recent and upcoming releases. The cover she showed us for the second book in the series, “Trial By Fire”, was striking. At one point when I decided I needed to become more familiar with Baen’s authors I considered reading one from that series. But then I saw the cover for “Fire With Fire” and changed my mind. For some reason the guy in the impossibly-small, cliched space ship just looked cheesy to me.
But then I read an interview with Charles E. Gannon on Brad Togersen’s website and decided I might want to give it a try after all. I found there was an audio book version available and picked it up. My first impression was that Baen seems to have difficulty picking top-notch readers. Though better than the one who read “The Chaplain’s War”, this fellow was a little difficult to discriminate between voices at first, and his tone of voice always seemed just a little snide somehow. But I got used to it, and eventually it didn’t bother me.
The novel focuses around Caine Riordan, an independent researcher/analyst around a hundred years from now who disappears while investigating military projects on the moon. He awakes thirteen years later from cryosleep with no memory of how he got there. And now the people who helped put him there want him to investigate evidence of a sapient extra-terrestrial race on one of Earth’s outer colony worlds. Things only get deeper and more dangerous from there, and Riordan soon finds himself to be the right guy in the right place at the wrong time.
The book itself is also a bit meandering. It’s interesting enough, but it really felt like three books in one. In hindsight this is partly for exposition. How better to understand how the setting works than by getting the main character out in it? And there are threads that run all the way through the book, so ultimately it made sense why it unfolded the way it did. And it was, ultimately, satisfying.
I also had a few problems with the protagonist, Caine Riordan. He was supposedly an analyst, but he just seemed a little too good at a lot of things. Supporting characters acknowledged him as something of a generalist, but even so, he just always seemed to have the right read on things, and knew how to react accordingly. But in time that bothered me less and less, too. Perhaps it was because he was consistently smart, but not infallible. He could still miss things. He could still be outmaneuvered.
So it should seem evident that while the book took time to grow on me, I did enjoy it quite a bit. There’s action enough throughout, but it’s very much an intellectual book. Gannon has thought things through quite carefully, and has populated his book with a cast of smart people. But it’s also written in such a way that the reader feels like one of the group–smart enough to belong and keep up, just not necessarily experienced in the characters’ specialties. It’s not a “Look how smart I/my character are” book. It’s a book that assumes the reader is smart and will have fun exploring the galaxy with Caine.
And I did. By the third act things were set up and really cranking, and I had a blast being the fly on the wall to watch a group of really sharp people work their way through a very complex, difficult situation. When the book ended I was ready to go out and get the next one.
It’s an interesting study in morality, too. Riordan’s world-view is largely black and white, but he’s also a pragmatist, willing to concede the greater good. Yet he’s thrown in with a group of characters who, while in service to that same greater good, are often forced–though sometimes merely choose–to use questionable means to achieve their ends. They are manipulators and schemers, and yet it’s hard to question their means in light of what they’re up against. They’re doing what they believe is right, even if it makes them, others, and the reader uncomfortable.
There’s enough language to earn an R rating, and sex is alluded to, but not depicted.
I didn’t think I’d enjoy this book as much as I did. I attribute my enjoyment to Gannon’s ability to make “boardroom discussion” scenes as interesting as action scenes–and there are a lot of discussion scenes. Most of the “action” of the third act relies on smart people thinking, and it was fun. The stakes were high, the tension was ramped up, and the mental chess was as exhilirating (to me) as combat scenes. The novel closes with the stage set for an even more whiz-bang second book. I’ll be getting to it sooner or later. Probably sooner.